Awards
2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
Synopses & Reviews
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of three previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, and The Spell. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black memorial Prize for Fiction, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. He lives in London.
Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of 2004
It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Tobywhom Nick had idolized at Oxfordand Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility.
As the boom years of the mid-eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in matter of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' worldits grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing. In an era of endless possibility, he finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession with beautya prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance, but it is a later affair with a beautiful millionaire that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.
Framed by the two election that returned Margaret Thatcher to power, The Line of Beauty unfurls through four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly funny, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of 2004
"In this saga about the Thatcher years Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did. Hollinghurst is never mocking or caricatural but subtly observant and completely participant. He writes the best prose we have today."Edmund White
"This is the fourth novel by one of the best stylists in the English language and winner of this year's Booker Prize. It has a well-developed plot and a large cast of charactersat the center of which is a young man searching for love and purpose in Margaret Thatcher's England. But the rich Tories and bitter Laborites battling for control of Britain's soul take a back seat to the book's elegant but sturdy prose, which is as finely crafted as an ornamental design on an old vase or in the stonework of a church portal."Michael Shelden, The Baltimore Sun
"In this saga about the Thatcher years Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did. Hollinghurst is never mocking or caricatural but subtly observant and completely participant. He writes the best prose we have today."Edmund White
"A classic of our times. The work of a great English stylist in full maturity; a masterpiece."The Observer
"Wonderful . . . almost unbelievably well-written . . . Finely wrought but tough, close -in observation."Spectator
"A magnificent novel . . . There are literally thousands of impeccably nuanced touches."Daily Telegraph
"There is something memorable on every page . . . There is much to savour in The Line of Beauty, not least its humour, a shivering yet morally exacting satire that leaves no character untouched."The Times Literary Supplement
"Britisher Hollinghurst isn't shy: At 400-plus pages sprinkled with references to Henry James, his fourth outing aspires to the status of an epic about sex, politics, money, and high society. Though he's best known for his elegant descriptions of gay male life and pitch-perfect prose, Hollinghurst is most striking here for his successful, often damning, observations about the vast divides between the ruling class and everyone else. It's 1983, and narrator Nick Guest, age 20, is literally a guest in the household of Conservative MP Gerald Fedden, whose son, Toby, Nick befriended at Oxford. Given an attic room and loosely assigned the task of looking after the Feddens' unstable manic-depressive daughter Catherine, Nick is given entree into a world of drunken, drug-laced parties at ancestral manors, high-stakes financial transactions, and politicians all obsessed with catching a glimpse of 'The Lady'Thatcher herself (who finally does make a cameohilariouslytoward the end) . . . More fascinating are Hollinghurst's incisive depictions of the brilliance and ease that insulate and animate the Feddensespecially the witty and difficult Gerald and the spectacular mess that is Catherineand the crushing realization that Nick, unlike those around him, does not have the casual luxury to crash up his own life and survive. A beautifully realized portrait of a decade and a social class, but without a well-developed emotional core."Kirkus Reviews
"Among its other wonders, this almost perfectly written novel . . . delineates what's arguably the most coruscating portrait of a plutocracy since Goya painted the Spanish Bourbons. To shade in the nuances of class, Hollingsworth uses plot the way it was meant to be usednot as a line of utility, but as a thematically connected sequence of events that creates its own mini-value system and symbols . . . While Hollinghurst's story has the true feel of Jamesian drama, it is the authorial intelligence illuminating otherwise trivial pieces of story business so as to make them seem alive and mysteriously significant that gives the most pleasure . . . This novel has the air of a classic."Publishers Weekly
Review
"Edmund White has said that Alan Hollinghurst 'writes the best prose we have today.' I might not go that far...but if you value style, wit and social satire in your reading, don't miss this elegant and passionate novel." Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
Review
"Hollinghurst is most striking here for his successful, often damning, observations about the vast divides between the ruling class and everyone else....A beautifully realized portrait of a decade and a social class, but without a well-developed emotional core." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"The Line of Beauty gets Nick and his decade so right that you can't help wondering what sort of vision Hollinghurst may deliver of our own far-too-interesting times, 20 years hence." Seattle Times
Review
"It is only worrisome that The Line of Beauty, one of the most mentally nurturing reads this year, is so similar to The Swimming-Pool Library; one hopes that Hollinghurst, who should be beloved, will take us farther afield in the future." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Hollinghurst proves to be one of the sharpest observers of privileged social groupings since Anthony Powell....For the first time, there is a clear sense that Hollinghurst has extended his powers to create a universe rather than a clique; and though it adopts a highly privileged perspective, the novel has sufficient breadth to evoke the full social spectrum of 1980s Britain gay and straight, rich and poor." Alfred Hickling, Guardian (London)
Review
"No one writes novels better than Hollinghurst; he puts together books that are like pieces of furniture made without nails. Here he dramatizes with innumerable apt details and intricate plotting a whole household meant to stand for the Thatcher era....Things move along in this tour de force at a rapid pace...: a large cast of sharply drawn characters comes in and out; one dazzling set piece succeeds another; the dialogue is so good you want to hear actors deliver it on film....The writing has never been sharper...." Andrew Holleran
Review
"As a novelist, Alan Hollinghurst's has set himself an intimidating standard....To say, then, that his latest novel, the Booker Prize-winning LINE OF BEAUTY, is also his finest should give some idea of its accomplishment, not just in the breadth of its ambition but in its felicities of observation and expression....Despite Nick's sexual adventures, the novel marks a change from Hollinghurst's predominantly homocentric fiction. In fact, female characters, hitherto felt by some readers as a decided absence, are among the liveliest here....Although it gathers ominously in mood, The Line of Beauty feels more blissful than baleful in its anatomy of the era because it is, among other things, a magnificent comedy of manners." Anthony Quinn, New York Times Book Review
Review
"[Hollinghurst's] best writing is more disciplined than this, more subtly melded of its thematic constituents, and above all more profound, more truly Jamesian in its treatment of the ordeals of consciousness. Nonetheless, there is much to savour in The Line of Beauty: not least its humour, a shivering yet morally exacting satire that leaves no character untouched and finally consumes the grotesques whose odiousness it has so generously indulged. Equally and characteristically, there is the stinging precision of its prose, a near-poetic aptitude for producing the very thing its title tantalizingly portends." Henry Hitching, The Times Literary Supplement (read the entire Times Literary Supplement reveiw)
Review
"Line for line, Hollinghurst's novel about London during the 1980s is the most exquisitely written book I've read in years. Witty observations about politics, society, and family open like little revelations on every page. But it's also an explicitly gay novel....All this should produce a complex reception for the Booker winner. In some quarters, the novel's triumph will be a late vindication for gay literature. Others will fret over the shocking sex scenes. But anyone who reads The Line of Beauty will come face to face with one of the most brilliant stylists and perceptive novelists writing today." Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire Christian Science Monitor review)
Review
"Hollinghurst's prose is a genuine achievement lavish, poised, sinuously alert. His sentences are rich but not languid. He is an aesthete who finally avoids aestheticism, partly because, in a characteristic Jamesian swerve, he is morally suspicious of an aestheticism whose charms he also swayingly registers. His writing is most Jamesian, perhaps, in its constant air of poised intelligence..." James Wood, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the NBCC award. From Alan Hollinghurst, the acclaimed author of The Sparsholt Affair, The Line of Beauty is a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy.
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby--whom Nick had idolized at Oxford--and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
Synopsis
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby whom Nick had idolized at Oxford and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
Synopsis
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.
Synopsis
THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER, WINNER OF THE 2004 MAN BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION, AND NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST
Winner of 2004s Man Booker Prize for fiction and one of the most talked about books of the year, The Line of Beauty is a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money that brings Thatchers London alive.
A New York Times Bestseller (Extended) · A LA Times Bestseller List · A Book Sense National Bestseller · A Northern California Bestseller · A Sunday Times Bestseller List · A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
And chosen as one of the best books of 2004 by:
Entertainment Weekly · The Washington Post · The San Francisco Chronicle · The Seattle Times
Newsday · Salon.com · The Boston Globe · The New York Sun · The Miami Herald · The Dallas Morning News · San Jose Mercury News · Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of three novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, and The Spell. He lives in London.
Exclusive Essay
Read an exclusive essay by Alan Hollinghurst